A creative, home-made, hand-made blog

What?! Yes! I tell you, it’s awesome.. if you like mint. You can use flavored syrups in a variety of drinks, and some are even good on ice cream or other desserts. This syrup is something I use in my iced tea, and I love it. LOVE.

It’s super simple, if you don’t think you’ll use a lot, don’t make a whole lot.

What You’ll Need:

A jar, bottle, or other clean, recycled container (I used an empty Amaretto bottle)

1/2 cup Sugar

1 cup Water

Mint

After you have a decent sized mint plant, and it’s growing wild, you can start “harvesting” it. I waited until mine started to flower. (Side note: any herb or edible plant has it’s best flavor right before flowering. You can discourage flowering by “pinching”, or cutting, off those buds, which will encourage more branching.)

All I did was take my kitchen scissors and go to town. I didn’t want to cut it back too hard, just in case our wonderful summer weather decided to heat up too much, but I had roughly 1 foot stems on the plant and I cut most of those down to roughly 6 inches. I left some stems longer, and just removed the buds, but I was also making a rather large batch!

I know that crushing the leaves and stems releases the flavor, but I just didn’t want to chop all this mint. I took it by the handfuls and just crushed it by twisting and bending it. Your hands will smell delightfully minty. As will your kitchen. If you aren’t like me, and you want to chop it up, go crazy. Chop up everything. Stems and leaves.

Get a decent sized pot and add your water and your sugar. If you want more, the ratio is 2 parts sugar to 1 part water. This should produce a fairly syrupy product. If you want it a little thinner, you can add a little more water.

Turn the heat on medium and stir to dissolve the sugar. Once dissolved, turn the heat up to med-high and look for a rolling simmer, not really a hard boil. Once you get there, let it simmer/boil for a few minutes, 2-3. (Side note: It’s SUPER IMPORTANT NOT TO BOIL THIS TOO LONG. A few minutes will do. 2-3.) turn off the heat and remove the pot.

NOW.. Throw in your mint! If you were like me and didn’t chop it up, then shove it in. Stir the syrup and make sure the mint is covered or at least wet. Cover your pot with a lid. The minty flavor oils can evaporate, so try to leave the lid in place. I know how nice it smells, but just leave it.

Leave it alone. For a while. The heat from the syrup will “cook” the mint. After oh, 10-15 minutes, go ahead a take a look inside. The mint should resemble cooked greens, like cooked spinach. It will be darker green than it was when we started. If not, stir it around again and leave it alone again.

If everything looks great, it’s time to strain the mint into our bottle. I used a coffee filter in a funnel. It’s what I had on hand! And it worked!

Just pour everything into the strainer/filter and funnel, slowly! You don’t want to be over zealous in your excitement for that first minty iced tea and spill syrup everywhere (like me. Cough. Cough).

Once it’s all strained, just squeeze the mint, or push on it with the back of a spoon to get out any extra syrup then throw away the mint. It’s all used up.

TA-DA! You have just made minty syrupy goodness!

Mint Iced Tea

Mint Syrup to taste. I just “eyeball it”, but I’m guessing it’s close to a tablespoon per 16 oz. glass. It might be more or less, just depends on how minty you want it and how strong your tea is! 😉

Okay, so some of you think this is the simplest and easiest thing ever, and you’re wondering why I’m writing about it, others of you are thinking.. “What tea?”

Sun Tea. It’s easy. It’s a very frugal way to not heat up the house with a burner from the stove, and save the energy you would use heating that stove, and the A/C it would take to cool it back off.

And it’s just fun for the kids, a lot of the time!

What You’ll Need:

A Jar (I used a clean pickle jar)

Your favorite tea (in bags or if you want to use loose tea, you’ll need a tea ball/infuser)

Fill the jar with water and throw in your tea bags (or the infuser with your loose tea). Now find a sunny spot outside. Leave the jar in the sun for a while, until you like the strength. It will take a while, depending on how warm it is outside. Now, in Oklahoma, it can get pretty hot, so a few hours will do. But if you live in a place where it’s not as warm, you might be looking at 4 hours or more. This is not a speedy thing.

Once you like the strength, pull the jar inside and finish it with your sugar (because around here, that’s how we drink it). If you don’t like sweet tea (what is WRONG with you?) than you’re all done!

Kids think this is pretty cool, so its a great thing for them to help you with. 🙂

If you like to garden so that you can really home-make things yourself, than you’ll enjoy this one.

I like mint flavor. I like the smell. I’m not in love or anything, but I find it pleasant, and even enjoy mint tea on occasion. When I found out that mint plants were easy to grow (and I mean, they-turn-into-a-weed-if-you’re-not-careful, easy) I wanted one.

I’ve actually grown it before, having tried sowing it from seed. This is uber difficult. Apparently, mint seeds have a 50% chance of growing, so out of a seed packet, you’ll get lucky if you get 50% of those seeds to grow. (However, germinating the seeds in a paper towel first, does do some good, that’s another post!).

So anyway, if you’re like me, and you’re broke more often than not, You’ll love finding a way to get this plant without paying for it.

Here are some ways to do it:

Ask around! Mint is SO prolific and easy to grow that if someone has ever made the mistake of putting it directly into their garden, they will be digging it up for years and years. Most people that have a decent sized plant will be more than happy to provide you a plant or two.

Ask for a cutting. If your friends or family don’t really have a lot of mint, but they do have a plant. Mint is SUPER easy to grow from a cutting, and I will explain how to do this in a moment.

Freecycle.org : Go look on Freecycle.org and ask for a plant or two. If you’re frugal, you should know all about this site. It’s like an email list/group of people that all post things they want/need or are looking to get rid of. It’s all for free.

Lastly, you can do what I did, and find some!

Okay, so number 4 is pretty vague. What I did was found out that one of my favorite restaurants had mint growing outside. I have been their enough to have seen them hacking at it with a weedwhacker. That smell is distinct. You can’t mistake mint.

So the last time we went to eat there (which was nearly 6 months or more ago, now) I pinched off a decent stem with my fingers. I had planned to do this before we left, so I had a wet paper napkin from dinner. I put the “cutting” into this paper napkin, making sure the “cut” end was inside the wet napkin.

Once I got home, I picked off the last two leaves (make sure you get one that has 3-4 leaf “sets”, for good measure) and I put the cut end into a cup of water. I also made sure the area I had picked the leaves off was in the water, because this is where the roots will shoot out from first. I put it in my window and made sure to keep the water at the same level.

After about 2 weeks, I had roots, and the plant was ready for the outdoors! TA-DA! Mint plant for free.

Here, you can see the roots starting to grow.

Now all you have to do is get some soil (I used top soil), poke a hole, put the plant in, and cover. Water regularly until you begin seeing new growth (which won’t be long). Once it gets in there, it will start going crazy! It likes sun, so put it somewhere sunny!

I put mine into cinder blocks, as part of a raised bed. This will keep it from spreading anywhere I don’t want it!

Do you have some Ugly Apples? You know what I mean, maybe they sat on your counter or in your fridge, neglected and forgotten. Maybe they were home grown, so they aren’t all perfect and pretty.

I hate the thought of throwing out good food. (Think of those kids that don’t ever get to eat, besides the money that you’re wasting!) Well, here’s a solution for those apples that people might have otherwise thrown out. Are you ready?

Make Homemade Applesauce

..In your crockpot, no less!

I peeled..

..cut, and cored these apples into regular size pieces.

Then I added them to the crock pot with the water, sugar, and cinnamon.

I covered with the lid and turned it on to cook all day (8 hours on my machine). I was going to be home so it didn’t matter how long it took, to me.

Essentially, all you’re trying to do is get the apples mushy. Once they get there, all you need is a masher (or a fork if you only have a few apples) and mash them all up. I liked the long time, low temp method, mashing when I thought they were soft enough, then I cooked it longer. It made the house smell AWESOME. I just kept mashing until I got it to a smoothness I liked.

Voila! You’ve just made applesauce! Once you’ve made it the first time, you can always take away some of the sugar, or add more cinnamon, or take out the cinnamon, you know? Play with it a little. You won’t be disappointed!